New Atmel based Arduino Bage Version

Futuristic human tracking is here

OpenBeacon infrastructure @OpenAMD project on Next Hope Conference in New York City

Conference attendees will witness first hand while voluntarily wearing futuristic RFID badges what human tracking capabilities have become. This system, termed OpenAMD, will both show the fun and reveal the dark side of familiar social networking websites like MySpace.

In addition to making the entire project open source, developers can now create their own software before the conference using the newly released public API.

Postmortem, and details on the setup

Leica 3D Visual

Personal privacy will become a thing of the past this July, when hackers unveil technology that could send privacy advocates into a panic mode.
The Next HOPE is over, and our OpenAMD deployment is packed up in it’s boxes and in storage. Some parts have already been shipped back to their home, and others are still waiting to go out.

If you were at TNH, you may have heard there were some technical issues with the badges that popped up on and off during the event. Yeah, it happens. Our issues came in 2 categories. We had some minor (and trivial to fix) power issues on some badges, and some connectivity confusion with the API and website. That is just part of the game when rolling out a system for 2K users in under 24 hours, on all volunteer effort, with approx. zero budget.

We had a lot of request for more details when we were at The Next HOPE, and below is some more information on what it took to make OpenAMD happen.

The System

Web based 2D live visualization

This video explores social networking components

This video shows amazing web-based AJAX visuals

The OpenBeacon 2.4GHz RFID reader system consisted of ~30 PoE Ethernet base stations hidden about the conference on 2 floors, an independent network for the readers, including 8-10 POE switches to power and send data, web servers, a data aggregation boxes, webserver box, API server box, Visualization displays. And 2 tents. Those are important, especially when someone is adding features until 3AM.

The Team

The core OpenAMD team for TNH came from all corners of the USA. We had contributors from Germany, San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and NYC.

The Timeline

To start with, a neighborly hacker started working on badge design months before the convention. Then about 5 weeks before the convention we started testing with a mini-network and a single machine as aggregation and API service.

The real crunch comes when we finally get access to the convention floor. Starting Thursday at 1PM, the OpenAMD team has serious crunchtime. We then have about 24 hours to get the readers installed, run our network, and setup the computers we need. Since these kinds of systems are only deployed once or twice a year, and the software is improved each time, there are always new details to work out.

So, that is a rough overview of the OpenAMD project rollout and setup. Hopefully that answers some questions folks had during The Next HOPE.